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Toward Utopia, Femspec Books
Toward Utopia, Femspec Books
Toward Utopia, Femspec Books
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Toward Utopia, Femspec Books

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First, the imagined societies described in the texts that Naomi Mercer examines here exhibit characteristics of kyriarchy, which she defines as “the interlocking axes of domination and privilege that determine the nature of relationships and the power differentials that affect them.” While gender is the primary focus of her analysis, she argues that “an individual’s positioning in power structures depends on multiple aspects of identity that fluctuate depending on the individual’s interactions with others, who are also multiply positioned.”

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 6, 2015
ISBN9781311467942
Toward Utopia, Femspec Books

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    Toward Utopia, Femspec Books - Naomi R. Mercer

    Toward Utopia:

    Feminist Dystopian Writing and Religious Fundamentalism in

    Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Louise Marley’s The Terrorists of Irustan,

    and Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

    © Copyright by Femspec 2015

    All Rights Reserved

    Smashwords Edition 2015

    Dedication

    for the partner and the offspring

    Acknowledgments

    Throughout this process, I have received support and encouragement from a great number of individuals. I would like to thank Dr. Batya Weinbaum, the editor of Femspec, who was so very willing to pursue a book project and saw the potential in this topic. I would especially like to thank two of my intellectual sounding-boards and feminist allies in a kyriarchal institution: Dr. Jessica Stock, my Jewish sister, and Dr. Mary Anne Meyers, for many an exchanged glance and raised eyebrow.

    I would like to thank the people who enable me to pursue my scholarship by taking over some of the logistics behind the scenes: Deborah Daley, my very able executive officer; Lori at MJM Cleaning, who keeps my house in much better condition than I could; and Team Hunter, who picked up my daughter after school every day and treated her as their own.

    I would like to thank my husband, Kerry Takenaka, for the amazing discussions that helped me work out my ideas, for accommodating not only my chaotic schedule but actively supporting my career goals, and for cooking many meals while still providing turn-down service. Lastly, I thank my daughter, Aurora, for enduring Army life in conjunction with my scholarly pursuits with resilience and forbearance (most of the time).

    The views expressed in this book are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.

    Table of Contents

    Dedication

    Acknowledgements

    Preface

    Introduction

    Chapter 1: Give Me Children or Else I Die: Control, Hypocrisy, and Resistance in

    Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

    Chapter 2: Their Fear Was Their Weakness: Fundamentalism, Power, and Terror in

    Louise Marley’s The Terrorists of Irustan

    Chapter 3: We Are People of the Book: Motherhood, Knowledge, and Hope in

    Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

    Conclusion: Toward Utopia

    Bibliography

    Preface

    Femspec is pleased to announce its first full-length critical work to be published in what we hope to offer in a developing series. Five years ago, we moved from publishing just a journal dedicated to challenging gender through the speculative arts, to opening up a branch, Femspec Books and Productions. Until Naomi approached us at the sign-out table of WisCon a few years back—2013 to be exact—we had published full-length memoir, fiction and books of New Age spiritual self-help, but no full-length critical works.

    When she came up to our table, covered with these books and various issues of the journal itself, our mutual experience was kind of like love at first sight. She was excited about the possibility of doing a book with us, and we found the idea of publishing a book about the backlash against feminism in the 80s and 90s as examined through novels of Atwood, Piercy and Marley to be exciting as well.

    A few aspects on the book itself to note:

    First, the imagined societies described in the texts that Naomi Mercer examines here exhibit characteristics of kyriarchy, which she defines as the interlocking axes of domination and privilege that determine the nature of relationships and the power differentials that affect them. While gender is the primary focus of her analysis, she argues that an individual’s positioning in power structures depends on multiple aspects of identity that fluctuate depending on the individual’s interactions with others, who are also multiply positioned.

    Mercer argues that gender or other aspects of identity may be more or less important, more or less identifiable in unequal power relationship. I understand this framework to be similar to that of overdetermination, originally a concept from psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud. He first used the idea to critically ponder how one aspect of a person’s psychology or the same manifesting symptom may be determined by more than one cause. The French philosopher Louise Althusser subsequently introduced the notion of overdetermination as a critical lens used to examine culture and society. In doing so, Althusser effectively offered a challenge to the Marxist economic reductionist interpretation of historical materialism. For Althusser, things are not explained by a single, pure contradiction, but always by the whole structure.

    Thus similarly serving as a point of departure for critical inquiry from merely explaining all manifestations as stemming from gender, the way Althusser by extending Freud’s notion of overdetermination from psychology to society and thus adding nuance to the consideration of economics and class as solely determinant, what Mercer identifies as kyriarchal positioning she discovered to be evident in the religious societies of the feminist authors whose utopian and dystopian novels she explored.

    Second, Mercer creatively organized her chapters discussing the novels as to degree of utopian vision each offered, rather than chronologically, As she explains, as her critical narrative unfolds, she moves from dystopic extremes with faint utopian impulses toward alternatives for utopic religious communities.

    Third, you will find her successfully weaving in aspects of her own and her authors’ biographies, thus exhibiting true feminist reflexivity—a tradition which we endeavor to keep alive.

    Thus in conclusion, we look forward to your discovery of how she does indeed saying something new about each of these texts. We consider this book to be an outstanding example of critical works to proceed, and encourage you to contact us with your ideas.

    Thanks and enjoy!

    -Batya Weinbaum, Cleveland Heights, April 18, 2015

    Introduction

    Religion without humanity is a poor human stuff.

    – Sojourner Truth (Gilbert and Titus 26)

    For this is what dystopian future fictions recount: what would have happened if their empirical and implied readerships had not been moved to prevent it.

    – Andrew Milner, Changing the Climate: The Politics of Dystopia (354)

    Science fiction is an ideal vehicle for distributing progressive social theories to a popular audience, distilled through narrative form. However, the common perception of science fiction and its related utopian and dystopian sub-genres has traditionally tended to focus on male-centered quest narratives that may appear to push against the boundaries of social norms—yet these narratives seem to almost exclusively expand the universe for white, heterosexual, upper-class, able-bodied men. In doing so, these genre texts frequently re-inscribe patriarchal standards for women and subaltern Others. In utopian and dystopian writing, the fascination with science and technology functions as a means for male protagonists to exert power and control over their societies and shape them to fit an androcentric ideal of a fulfilled life, free of work and want. Although writers such as Lois McMaster Bujold and Kim Stanley Robinson transgress the predictable generic outcomes of science fiction, many writers rarely do so in ways that remove white, heterosexual, upper-class men from their position representing the universal human being.

    Genres of fiction in popular culture, such as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, and other forms produced primarily for consumption in mass-market formats, generally follow certain formulae: readers come to texts with a set of expectations based on the genre in which the book is written and marketed. In hard science fiction, for example, readers generally expect a text to combine advanced technology with space exploration or colonization that is clearly set in a future time relative to the reader’s own lived reality. Generic formulae influence cultural (footnote 2) values, in some cases, by reinforcing traditionally-held social norms and in others, by questioning those values. As John G. Cawelti, whose scholarly work focuses on genre writing, observes, Formulas assist in the process of assimilating changes in values to traditional imaginative constructs (36). Often, writers press against the boundaries set by the formula of a specific genre in the service of changing cultural and social values.

    Feminist science fiction writers use science fiction and its widely recognized appeal to distill social and political theory as well as to comment on social and cultural conditions to a wide audience. Feminist science fiction writers have taken seriously not only the emergence of the counter-culture in the 1960s and the Second Wave of the feminist movement in the 1970s, but also the rise of the Religious Right and the conservative swing of the political pendulum in the United States that resulted in the 1980s backlash against feminist civil rights as documented by journalist Susan Faludi, feminist religious studies scholar Karen Armstrong, and anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown. The politicization of fundamentalist Christianity in US politics created an environment hostile to the changes in society that Second Wave feminist activism and the Civil Rights Movement had made possible and reflected an on-going obsession with returning the status of women and subaltern Others to 1950s—or earlier—norms. In concert with feminist theorists (footnote one) who called for examination of multiple states of identity and the oppression that arises from sexism, racism, classism, and more, feminist science fiction writers address multiple sites of oppression in their fiction.

    (footnote one: Susan Stanford Friedman catalogues a plethora a feminist critics engaged in and calling for intersectional analysis in the 1980s and beyond: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Gayatri Spivak, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, among others (21, 50, 246 n.12, 246 n.13).

    Feminist science fiction writers transgress genre through querying the legitimacy of genre boundaries, gender binaries, and traditional, male-centered master narratives. Feminist writing across many genres has frequently engaged in challenging the inequalities of readers’ and (footnote 3) authors’ cultural and social milieus while also offering ideas for activism and ideals of equality and humanity worth striving toward. Feminist science fiction writers actively rebel against the master narrative formula of science fiction, and literature more generally, by focusing on women’s experiences of the world, while still adopting some of the genre characteristics of science fiction. However, feminist science fiction texts can and do revise these characteristics. Some feminist critics (footnote 2) maintain that feminist writers’ scrutiny of gender pushes at genre boundaries, as well as societal ones, in their texts.

    (footnote 2: See Gubar, Barr’s Feminist Fabulation, Baruch, and Rohrlich.)

    (footnote 3: See Baccolini and Donawerth.)

    Moreover, other feminist critics (footnote 3) argue that the utopian and dystopian sub-genre of science fiction blurs generic boundaries by incorporating multiple genres into single texts. For example, feminist utopian and dystopian novels often combine elements from fantasy, slave narrative, detective story, fable, epistolary novel, romance, quest narrative, historical novel, satire, polemic, ecotopia, and more. Instead of the static societies depicted in most non-feminist, traditional utopian writing described by a traveler or newcomer, feminist utopian writing in the twentieth century contrasts utopia with a dystopia that is frequently misogynistic and actively attempting to destroy the utopic community. Feminist utopias do not necessarily center on a single protagonist (male or female) and a quest for self-realization or knowledge of the utopian society presented. Feminist dystopian writing is nearly always set in the future or the near-future. Yet as a collective, the works tend to confront contemporary social and cultural models that subordinate women and subaltern Others to white, heterosexual, upper-class, able-bodied men. Because feminist dystopian writing often draws from multiple genres, this literature engages a history of generic and literary narratives generally perceived as ignoring, silencing, erasing, and oppressing women and demands a re-reading of women and their experiences. (footnote 4)

    Feminist writers, especially in the utopian/dystopian subset of science fiction, recognize the dangers of fundamentalism and its infusion into American politics. Writers who critique fundamentalist religion and its intersection with gender also integrate multiple genre styles into single texts. This hybridity contests the boundaries of generic formulae while simultaneously employing social commentary, interrogating cultural norms, and represent[ing] resistance to a hegemonic ideology (Baccolini 18). Through these hybrid texts, late twentieth-century feminist science fiction writers present commentary on organized religion, specifically fundamentalism, in ways that demonstrate the intersection of various aspects of identity with religious faith.

    Feminist science fiction writing, especially in the utopian/dystopian sub-genre, closely follows political trends and circulates alternative viewpoints on politics, culture, and society. Although female-dominant utopias had been written earlier in the twentieth in America before by authors such as Leslie F. Stone, Lilith Lorraine, and even in the nineteenth century congruent with the rise and achievements of the suffrage movement, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the political and social gains of the Second Wave feminism (footnote 4) led to a new peak of American feminist utopian writing. Subsequently, the resurgence of a period of backlash (footnote 5) in the 1980s and the heightening of Cold War militarization wrought changes in the feminist movement and in feminist utopian writing, resulting in a distinctive, and persistent, dystopian turn. (footnote 6)

    (footnotes: 4 See Gamble. 5 See Faludi. 6 See Barr’s Lost in Space, Cranny-Francis, Fitting’s The Turn from Utopia in Recent Feminist Fiction, and Patai. 7 Modernity is a fraught and much contested term; scholars have extensively criticized modernity as a master narrative of Western progress and its neglect of alternative narratives. Moghissi uses modernity as diametrically opposed to tradition. For this project, I have adopted Moghissi’s usage and meaning of anti-modernity as a resistance to progressive ideas, including democracy and feminism, justified through reliance upon tradition.)

    Generally, fundamentalist religions demonstrate ideologies that secular Muslim feminist Haideh Moghissi categorizes as anti-modernity, (footnote 7) anti-democracy, and anti-feminism (70). The didactic force of feminist authors’ narrative messages against fundamentalism problematizes the conservative backlash of the 1980s and also intervenes in theoretical (and theological) arguments in the political arena through a popular medium. The writers of such texts directly respond to the continued denial of universal human rights to women and subaltern Others. Transgressions of genre abound through the hybridity of these texts and their challenge to traditional master narratives, that is, male-centered narratives that promulgate Western ideology. The female and/or feminist point of view furthermore undermines male-centered norms by using women’s voices to defy the assumed universality of human experience. Furthermore, feminist voices demonstrate that utopia is not the good place, or in any sense ideal, without equality for women and subaltern men. Feminist utopian and dystopian texts demonstrate that utopia is a process, rather than a static state, and that utopian communities must continually strive for improvement.

    Feminist utopian and dystopian writing which criticizes religious fundamentalism challenges the legitimacy of the underpinnings of Western thought and culture in ways that political dystopias do not. In the 1970s, primarily using the utopian sub-genre, feminist science fiction authors introduced positive views of goddess- and Earth-mother-centered religions into science fiction texts. In their estimation, in order to overthrow patriarchy permanently, at every level of society, gynocentric religions needed to replace paternalistic gods, male leadership and control of the religious sphere. This would accomplish debunking the masculinized view of women as impure or blameworthy and therefore subordinate to men. Feminist utopian writers, in many respects, reclaim religion from fundamentalist orthodoxy and its resistance to recognizing the full humanity of women through gynocentric religions. Their critique of fundamentalist religious institutions is implicit in their texts, rather than directly narrated. These implications are accomplished through contrasting contemporary fundamentalism with the peaceful and compassionate goddess-centered religions depicted in utopian writing.

    Concurrent with the 1980s backlash against Second Wave Feminism, feminist writing underwent a dystopian turn from some of the goddess-centered utopian visions of the 1970s, by authors such as Sally Miller Gearhart, to frightening dystopian imaginings that often featured the dangers of fundamentalism. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, feminist dystopian writers tended to follow the science fiction rejection of religion as a meaningful aspect of life. However, feminist science fiction did not generally participate in the science fiction trope of elevating women into gods with ultimate control over their environments and other sentient beings as occurs in such male-centered stories as The Worthing Saga (1990), The Man who Folded Himself (2003), and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). (footnote 8) While feminist science fiction writers are very conscious and conspicuous in their estimations of religion, specifically fundamentalist forms, they seem to lack the elements of an inward search for some sort of absolute truth or transcendent reality (Reilly 5) which characterizes male-authored science fiction texts with religious themes. Rather, feminist dystopian writers use their appraisals of religious fundamentalism as a way to examine contemporary trends in US culture, particularly the rise of the Religious Right and the conservative backlash against feminist advancements for women. Through the utopian impulse in dystopian texts, feminist voices undermine religious justifications for maintaining the male-dominated systems of power in Western societies; they warn that the goal of fundamentalism is male control of women’s fertility and, by extension, control of women. Moreover, they argue that legal changes are not enough to ensure equality since laws can be reversed and liberal progress can be legislated out of existence. Feminist dystopias and utopias that investigate religious fundamentalism seek to expose, and possibly to change, the inherent misogyny in Western culture as well as the unequal structures of power that Western ideology has perpetuated so that a privileged few retain control of the social order.

    (footnote: 8 By Card, Gerrold, and Heinlein, respectively.)

    The Intersection of Science Fiction, Religion, and Gender

    Although much science fiction is secularist and venerates technological advancement over belief in the supernatural or divine, this perspective does not reflect the reality of many people’s lives—of which religion is an abiding part. Specializing in religious studies though primarily concerned with Christianity, sociologist Linda Woodhead has pointed out the lacunae of scholarship on the intersection of religion and gender in sociological studies despite the large numbers of women who make up the majority of attendees of religious services in the United States (72). Moreover, despite a small number of science fiction anthologies whose themes involve the treatment of religion in science fiction settings, (footnote 9) few feminist and non-feminist critics have explored the interplay of religion and gender in science fiction and/or in the utopian/dystopian sub-genre other than as incidental to a larger analysis of patriarchy. Feminist science fiction writers criticize this religiously-justified oppression of women and the subsequent cultural implications of women’s inferiority while simultaneously questioning the validity of science fiction’s marginalization of religion and its potential to create meaning in people’s lives.

    (footnote: 9 See Mohs’s Other Worlds, Other Gods (1971); Dann’s Wandering Stars (1974) and More Wandering Stars (1981); Hayward and Lefanu’s God: An Anthology of Fiction (1992).)

    Feminist writers reject science fiction’s re-inscription of patriarchal gender roles—roles perpetuated throughout mainstream Western philosophy and frequently justified through tenets of religious faiths that resist modern progress. Feminist science fiction writers view religious fundamentalism as inherently misogynist, due to selective literal interpretation of sacred texts, internal Othering, and boundary-policing of women that subordinates women to men. They also regard fundamentalism as corrupt because of its hypocrisy, based on its tenets, toward women.

    Although mainstream religious faiths have made progress to varying degrees toward equality, I argue that religious fundamentalism and its insistence upon tradition plays an essential role in the perpetuation of women’s inequality in Western thought and culture. Feminist dystopian visions exhibit the reality of fundamentalist oppression of women and Others through the auspices of religious faith. This book engages in an expanded dialogue on the intersection of various aspects of identity and fundamentalist religion in feminist science fiction. I additionally explore implications for gender, race, sexual orientation, and class.

    Like feminists in the political arena, many contemporary feminist writers ask whether the inherent patriarchal structures of religion can be reformed, revisioned, or reclaimed to be gender equal. Yet some seem to maintain that certain faiths are so enmeshed in patriarchy that they are irredeemable from a feminist standpoint. In particular, many feminist utopian writers of the 1970s seem to judge traditional religions of any type as hopelessly incurable.(footnote 10) However, feminist dystopian writers since the 1980s who may find fundamentalist manifestations of faith irredeemable do not unilaterally condemn all religion as such. Despite science fiction’s tendency toward secularism and use of technology to exemplify the human condition, oppression of women and subaltern men by social and political institutions continues to present an ever-growing need for equality across many facets of identity. Without such considerations, infusing equality in lasting and meaningful ways into our culture may present an insurmountable task.

    (footnote:10 See Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World (1974), Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1976), and Russ’s The Two of Them (1978).

    What interests me as a woman, a scholar, an Army officer, and a Jew are the ways in which feminist science fiction writers deploy accounts of religious fundamentalism in their fictional texts and why this is central to an interrogation of social conditions. I analyze why and how a number of feminist science fiction authors are participating in this debate, especially in late twentieth-century feminist dystopian writing. I focus on texts that engage with the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These faiths have a god-figure in common, share some sacred texts

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